Weird Between Us
by nanirain
Summary: Oneshot.N/S. They had gone three months without any meaningful physical contact. At first Naruto thinks he's imagining things, but its clear now: Sakura is definitely avoiding him. Well, let's see how she plans to avoid this. Things are getting awkward...


**A/N**: Okay. Most good and loyal NS fans will, upon reading, go all, "wait a second, this is MuseSilver's work!" Yesh, mah pretties, yesh it is. In short, this fic is totally and 100% inspired by and based upon two of MuseSilver's artworks "NaruSaku: Avoidance" and "NaruSaku: No Turning back...". I have alerted both the artist (and now you, the readers) that this is the case, and I'll be sending MuseSilver the link to the fic. so that a request can be made to take it down if its disliked. We cool? Cool.

These are the links to the artworks, respectively (but if you want to not get spoiled for the end of the fic, you should probably go to them after wards) Remove the spaces:

http:// musesilver . deviantart .com/gallery/#/d1lh193

http:// musesilver . deviantart .com/gallery/#/d20iq4s

P.S. if you don't know who MuseSilver is, I don't want to know who you are. :P

**Disclaimer**: Naruto (c) belongs to Kishimoto. The ending of the story basically belongs to MuseSilver. Even the italicized line at the end is MuseSilver's, not mine. So this is sort of a fanfic twice over... yeahh.

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It had been three months without any meaningful physical contact. Three months. Naruto's grip on the examining table tightened. His nose wrinkled at the smell of the clinic. Metallic. Sanitized. At first, he though he'd been imagining it. For all outward appearances, she hadn't seemed to be treating him any differently. But if Naruto knew anything well, it was the feeling of being methodically avoided. He had the kyuubi to thank for that. And there was no mistaking it, Sakura was avoiding him.

He had tried provoking her, making stupid comments, stupid by even his standards, cracking jokes that usually had her shaking him by the throat. She had let them pass with only verbal abuse. He had tried offering to spar, but a last minute commitment would always come up: a chore for Tsunade, extra work in the hospital, a shopping date with Ino and Tenten – he had been shrugged off for _Ino_ _and_ _Tenten_? He had even tried showering more frequently, in case this was a hygiene problem. No results except for the village girls asking him how he exfoliated, his skin was _soo _smooth. "_Scrub till you bleed, four times daily_," he'd shot back bitterly. And he had tried, finally, asking her about it. She had feigned ignorance.

Well, lets see how she avoided _this_. Naruto blinked his good eye at the tiled floor, careful not to overtly nurse the large, blackened one Chouji had given him only minutes ago when Naruto flatly called him a fatass. Shikamaru's horrified face was quickly blotted out by a row of knuckles and then red pain. Admittedly, he hadn't been quite prepared for the full force of Chouji's fist. It had hurt. A lot. But at least it got the job done, to make an understatement. And he supposed the more authentic this looked the better.

The door clicked open, Naruto sat upright. He was expecting bubblegum pink hair and leveling jade eyes. What he got was a corpulent, black face with beady eyes and a squashed, pink snout. Shino's pig.

Naruto stared blankly, rather numb. Shino herself, holding the pig, blinked, taken aback at the grotesqueness of Naruto's eye. "You haven't even iced that, have you?" Naruto stared dumbly at the porcine creature enveloped in Shino's arms. It stared back at him. What was happening began to sink in. Shino placed the black piglet on the counter and opened a drawer of cold packs, starting a lecture on the basics of self-care. "Modern medicine may be remarkably efficacious but you can really make my job a lot easier with some common sense. Like icing impact wounds after you get hit."

He couldn't really hear her over the dull roaring in his ears. His sense of time blurred, how long had he been sitting here? The room felt hot. "Where," he practically growled, "is Sakura?"

Shino stiffened, uncomfortable. "She has some last minute reading to catch up on so she asked me to – Wait, Naruto, where -?"

The door slammed shut on Shino's sentence. On the other side of it, Naruto clenched his teeth until his gums throbbed. This was too much. "_Kage bunshin no jutsu!_" The clones tore the hospital apart. Naruto waited, unmoving until some part of his scattered mentality found what he was looking for. One of the clones threw open a door and was rewarded with a startled gasp. _Her office_. Dispelling his copies, Naruto took off at a run.

NSNSNSNSNSNS

"Sakura-chan!"

When he burst through the door frame, still open from when his clone had busted through it moments ago, Sakura was in the midst of opening the window. Cherry blossom hair flew in a wide halo around her face as she snapped around to look at him, wide eyed. A stretch of silence. Naruto narrowed his one good eye at the scene before him.

"Are you about to jump out the window?"

Sakura blinked. "What? N-no," she stammered. "Er, what happened to your eye?"

"Chouji's fist."

Sakura's eyebrows knit together. "Well, it looks serious. Why don't you go to the clinic? Shino's doing her hours." She attempted sincerity, but he saw the way her eyes kept nervously darting towards the window, her fingers still clenched around its wide frame. That was the face of someone who was weighing her options.

He strode across the room and seized her wrist, whirling her around.

"Don't even think about it."

Sakura sputtered. It seemed he had finally managed to catch her off guard. Maybe it had been the shock of the eye. "Think about what?"

To hell with this stupid, social dance. "About jumping out the window. And why are you avoiding me?"

"This again?" Sakura rolled her eyes, regaining her composure, but barely. "I'm not avoiding you. I'm just trying to air this place out. Why are _you_ avoiding Shino? You can't even see out of your right eye, can you?"

"Well enough to tell you're lying. Last minute reading?" Naruto flicked a glance over to her desk. A familiar, cracked scroll was spread across its surface. Sakura fidgeted. "You've read that scroll at least five times. That's not the reason you suddenly ditched clinic duty."

"N-no, that's, I just thought-" She paused, her eyes narrowed. "You know when I have clinic duty? You _planned _this?" There was some skepticism, he could see, that he was capable of something like plotting, which required a great deal of foresight. Admittedly, this kind of thing wasn't in his nature but the plan had been pretty basic: find out when Sakura's clinic hours were, wait for them, get hit. He hadn't imagined she'd actually have the gall to stand him up for treatment. To send _Shino_. Was it that bad? Whatever was making her put this distance between them? Did it make her desperate enough to jump out the window when he entered a room? Judging the poorly concealed look on her face, she hadn't yet completely discarded that window as an avenue of escape. He tightened his grip on her wrist unconsciously. She flinched.

And then something in him gave way. He felt himself transition from angry to desperate. His stomach began knotting itself. Shots of panicky adrenaline kicked in. "Please, Sakura," she seemed somewhat surprised at the sudden change in his tone. He leaned in closer to her, causing her to lean back until a good deal of her weight was hanging from his fist. Her back arched. Their hips came almost together. He was oblivious to the awkwardness of their position. She broke into a blush. "I've known you since we were twelve. I can tell when you're lying. Don't keep telling me that I'm imagining things… you're going to drive me insane."

For a moment, he thought he had finally convinced her. The answer to his question threatened to leak through her torn expression. And then the ire caught like kindling in her eyes. There was that familiar, sour scowl, the prelude to many a fist in his face. He was almost glad to see it -- any emotion was better than the carefully prepared mask she had been showing him for months. This, at least, was honest. "Don't you understand anything?" she snapped. "Couldn't you just let me work this out myself? Why do you make _everything_ harder?"

"You're the one whose been making things hard," he pointed out. "And its been _months_, Sakura. Just tell me what I've done. Tell me what you want me to do now and I'll do it. Or tell me if there's nothing I _can_ do. Hate me to my face but I can't stand this!"

There was pain in her expression. Some part in the back of his mind realized he might have been hurting her with his grip. A pang of regret – maybe he had crossed a line – he released her wrist. But she didn't move away, or spring for the window. The expression, if anything, intensified. Something, he had no idea what, was going on right in front of him. It was important. And he was very close to it. "_Baka_," she spat. Suddenly reaching forward, she knotted her fingers in his hair. And then she crushed their mouths together.

For moments, he stood completely still. Sakura was kissing him. There was a great deal of shock involved. And then everything melted into a hot, frantic blur. Sakura's legs found their way around his waist, wrapping tightly around his hips. The feeling was addicting, it went straight to his groin. He never wanted her, or it, to leave. He used his hands to fasten her there, one wrapping around the small of her back, the other finding its way to her ass. He slammed them against a wall. Sakura gasped. Separated, they were both out of breath. Naruto watched as shock and then something akin to mortification crept into her eyes, "I -"

He didn't want to hear it. He stopped her sentence before it left her mouth.

_This wasn't intentional. Now things are going to get weird between us, aren't they?

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**A/N**: Read the top AN. It's important, for once.


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